


The Lovers

by quantumoddity



Series: Widomauk Modern AU [5]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Tarot, Widomauk Week 2019, discussion of sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 08:07:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19103104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumoddity/pseuds/quantumoddity
Summary: Day 3- Tarot (and in a Modern AU)Caleb and Molly have a rare day off together and Mollymauk proposes a game





	The Lovers

The day had been one of those achingly rare ones, the ones that were empty of any work, any responsibilities, any duties. A day where Caleb had been entirely at his own mercy with no classes or papers due in anytime soon. Just a long, yawning day for him to fill with whatever he liked. 

Not long ago, the idea of a day like that would have set his nerves jangling and shrieking like alarm bells. He’d once hated having nothing to do, nothing to keep his hands busy and his mind from straying to places he didn’t want it to go. A year ago, upon finding himself in a position like this, he would have either scavenged some classwork or studying to do, desperately clawing for an assigned purpose, or sunk into a depression that he might not have got himself out of for a week. 

But things were different now, so different that Caleb had to wonder sometimes if he’d woken up as someone entirely new one day and just not realised it. Someone who smiled and slept more than three hours a night, someone who talked with others and only spent a few days with a roiling stomach ache brought on by anxiety. And even then, when he did feel like that, he would simply go and tell one of his friends and they would sit with him and help him remember that it would only ever be temporary. 

And then one of his friends had become something more, something he’d truly never thought he’d ever have. 

On his one, rare day off, Mollymauk had woken him well past sunrise with gentle kisses pressed to the nape of his neck and arms wrapping around his middle. Sleepy, gentle sex had followed without neither of them having to say a word, only giggling and trading a good morning back and forth once the two of them were panting, rumpled and sweating slightly. A late breakfast, kisses that tasted of chocolate and coffee on the threadbare second hand couch, a shared shower that went about the way you’d expect, a movie down at the theatre that neither of them particularly wanted to see but still managed to laugh all the way through by whispering comments to each other, all this went by with no effort at all. Not a single second did Caleb spend as prey to his own thoughts, worrying about things he should be doing or why there wasn’t anything he should be doing. The day was warm and bright for the verge of winter, Mollymauk’s hand was in his own and there was no reason to be afraid.

Now the long, warm day had turned into a chilly dusk that felt like it had no end, just a cool purple haze the two of them had sunken into like flies in amber. The thick curtains in Molly’s room kept out the worst of the cold that came along with the settling night while not losing the thick, orange light of the sunset. It made the whole room, with its deep purples and dark blues and gold highlighting, come to life with some strange ethereal warmth like they were in the sunset itself. 

Caleb lay sprawled on Molly’s bed with one of his pillows propping up his chin. Every so often he’d bury his nose in it and inhale as deep as he possibly could, smelling his boyfriend’s cologne and the mango shampoo he’d been favouring lately and the lavender oil he rubbed onto his horns before bed. Just as Mollymauk was half a hundred colours, he was half a hundred scents as well and Caleb was determined to memorise them all. 

Molly was sat on the floor, his battered old keyboard across his knees, scratching idly at the marker pen scrawling he’d done and redone over and over so he’d know which key was which note. His journal was open and some notes were scratched into it but they were the first few hesitant steps into unknown ground, nothing that was really at a good, solid run yet. He was picking some little riffs out here and there but most of it was a lot of frowning and scrawling in his books. Caleb knew Molly’s process by now, it would be a lot of this, a lot of huffing and fussing and smoking joints and melodrama until he worked the song out of his system. But Caleb always got the sense that Molly rather liked this part, he liked playing the tortured artist. And in the end the song would be wonderful, his usual mix of bittersweet and esoteric and otherworldly. . Molly just didn’t seem to remember that part right now. 

“You need to take a break,” Caleb observed from the pillow. 

“Why?” Molly craned his neck back to look at him upside down, “Because everything I’ve ever written sucks ass and my dreams of being a musician are completely futile?”

Caleb tried to hide the fact that the corners of his mouth were twitching upwards, “No. Don’t put your writer’s block’s words in my mouth.”

“It’s true,” Molly grumbled, turning back to the keyboard and walking his fingers across it to make a frustrated, discordant tune. 

Caleb shuffled forward enough that he could kiss the top of Molly’s head. His hair had been getting very long lately, growing out of the undercut he used to keep it in. He’d spoken wistfully the other night of having hair right down to his waist. 

“You’re trying to force it and it’s getting you all knotted up,” he observed sagely, “It’s like when I learn a new spell, happens every time. You get so frustrated when it doesn’t work after a hundred times but once you let go of that and turn away from it, it takes hold.” 

Molly grunted, leaning back into his embrace, “Quit being so wise or you’re gonna make me admit you’re right.”

Caleb laughed at that, reaching down to bat the keyboard off his knees, “Come up here with me. A watched pot never boils and all that.” 

“Sounds like a good way to burn my apartment down,” Molly hummed but he clambered up on his bed all the same. 

For a little while all they did was enjoy their closeness, Molly’s hands on Caleb’s waist, Caleb’s face resting in the crook of Molly’s neck. He could remember a time when he’d flinch away from any kind of touch like this, like if anyone’s fingertips so much as brushed him, they’d see he wasn’t really there and the illusion would be broken. But since they’d found each other, he’d become a glutton for it, for feeling someone else’s hair tickling his nose, hearing a soft, gentle breath in his ear. 

Until Molly broke apart, eyes shining in that way they did when he’d seized on a potentially wonderful, potentially destructive idea. 

“Let’s play a card game to pass the time!”

Caleb tilted his head, “I kind of thought we were working our way towards a different activity…”

“Oh, we’ll fuck, don’t worry,” Molly laid a soothing hand on his boyfriend’s arm, “But this will make it even more fun!” 

Caleb leaned back, curiosity sparked. Molly’s homebrewed card games were usually amazing and usually involved the revealing of scandalous secrets. 

And after Molly had eagerly withdrawn his favourite tarot deck from his desk drawer and explained the rules, in a tone that made it sound like he was definitely making this up on the spot, Caleb saw that this one would be no different. 

A question on the deck. Players withdrew two cards. Lower value card meant you had to answer the question. And from the way his red eyes narrowed and his tail lashed, Caleb knew the nature of those questions. 

“Sounds fun,” he grinned, lying back on the pillows, letting the oversized shirt he was wearing ride up just a little. Two could play at that game. 

“Nice easy one to start off with,” Molly declared, setting the cards, neatly shuffled, between them on Caleb’s discarded book like an island in the inky sea of his bedsheets, “Who was your first?” 

Caleb snorted, “You already know that.” 

“Hence why it’s easy,” Molly retorted, stretching out with an effortless laziness. He was wearing one of Caleb’s shirts as well, with boxer shorts that barely qualified as such given how small they were, showing off majority of his long tattooed legs. 

“Okay, okay…” 

Caleb drew the second card, Molly drew the sixth. He grinned wickedly as he showed off The Lovers. 

“Appropriate,” Caleb smirked, “Alright. As you well know, my first was my roommate from boarding school when I was seventeen. Percy.” 

“Come on, you can’t be that stingy with the details!” 

Caleb huffed out a laugh, “There aren’t really that many! Pretty standard missionary under his blanket in bed, terrified the whole time that we’d get caught. It was the time after in the library that’s really good…”

“Wait, what?” Molly sat bolt upright, eyes shining, “Spill it!”

Caleb merely shrugged with exaggerated innocence, sliding his card back into the deck, “Not part of the question, is it?” 

“Asshole!” Molly declared, surging forward into the next round with renewed eagerness, “Next question, where’s the wildest place you’ve ever had sex?”

“Don’t I ever get to pick the question?”

“I have decided no, on the grounds that you are an asshole.”

Caleb chortled when Molly drew the sixth and he drew the eighteenth. 

The tiefling shrugged carelessly, “It’s fine. Weirdest place I’ve ever had sex…probably in the bathroom of the pizza place on Sixth street.”

Caleb had to splutter a little at that, “No way, really?  _ And you go back there?” _

“I never said I got caught,” Molly points out, wagging his finger, “And when the hot half elf you’re seeing takes you out dancing with a vibrating plug in you, you’ll have sex anywhere, believe me.”

“We are never going back there…”

“Why? It’s got the best pizza.”

They traded back and forth like this for a while, until their throats were raspy from laughing and their jaws sore from grinning. Caleb quickly realised his stories were never going to be as exciting or varied as Mollymauk’s but he did get to tell him the story of the time he sucked Percy’s dick in the book stacks of their school’s library. That had made Molly fidget and purr excitedly, pressing his thighs together as his ears picked up. 

The two of them were teetering on the edge of scattering the cards to the floor and making a new story to tell later but Caleb was desperate to get at least one question in. Finally, Molly relented, admitting that the library study was good enough to earn him the right. 

Caleb’s hand hovered over the deck, fingers twitching as he thought. What was the one thing he wanted to know more than anything? 

Eventually what came out of his mouth was, “What does sex feel like? With the person you’re with now, I mean.” 

Mollymauk blinked, his smile softening. He took a card gladly. 

On the count of three, they turned them over and then burst out in bewildered laughter. They both held card number six. Though Caleb’s had a clearly different design from the other cards in the deck, they both held some image of two people entwined in each other, two sets of Lovers. 

“This is what you get for having an addiction to buying tarot cards, I guess,” Molly shrugged helplessly. 

“And for never keeping your stuff neat,” Caleb added, tucking some hair behind his ear, “You go first, though. Because it was my question.”

Molly nodded, thinking for a while, choosing his words carefully. He’d been fidgeting all the way through the game but now he was still, not even his tail twitching in its usual restless way. He looked out of the window as he thought, out into the nearly night. 

The stars were coming out, one by one, finding their way through the sunset. 

“Having sex with you feels like…it feels like I’ve finally found something I didn’t even know I was looking for. Something that was missing with everyone before. There’s just this piece of it finally in place, its whole, it’s complete…and that’s how I know you’re the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.” 

Caleb took a deep breath. He had to get through his answer quickly before he either burst into tears or pinned Mollymauk to the bed or both. 

“Being with you makes me realise I deserve to be happy. Because you look at me and you touch me and you kiss me and…and even the parts of me that are small and sad and broken can’t deny how much you love me. And if that’s true then I must deserve it. I must deserve you.” 

Molly’s hand had slid into his own after just a few words, holding tight like an anchor. Then it was his lips, as soon as the words left him. The pillows rushed up to meet them as Molly’s tail wrapped around his leg and his mouth found its way past the shirt he wore to the flushed, prickling skin underneath. 

The cards fell to the floor, as unnoticed and unremarked as night finally taking hold outside. They forgot the game and left the points not noted, leaving their paper lovers to their own carefully inked embraces.  

It had been a very, very good day. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Tumblr, @mollymauk-teafleak


End file.
